Katkat
Back

Design high-throughput event subscription system

GoogleSoftware Engineer · Technical Screen
HardSoftware EngineerTechnical ScreenSystem Design

Last updated

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, fault-tolerant event ingestion and subscription architectures, covering distributed systems, high-throughput messaging, content-based filtering, multi-tenant isolation, API/webhook design, delivery semantics, backpressure, sharding, security, and operational observability.

Design an event ingestion and subscription system where some clients send events fire-and-forget at up to 1,000,000 events per second. Other clients register subscription rules and webhooks to be notified of matching events. Define the rule expression language, registration APIs, webhook delivery with retries and backoff, ordering and filtering guarantees, backpressure, sharding, and scalability. Address multi-tenant isolation, rate limiting, and security.